Wherefore art thou Mark Hollis? The story of Hollis and his band Talk Talk has to be one of the more interesting of the synth pop era. Initially hailed in the music press as a poor man's Duran Duran (they shared the same producer, a similar name and toured with their new romantic counterparts), they took Neil Young's comment about travelling off of the middle of the road straight to the ditch more to heart than their peers.

At the time when the pop interview consisted of total inanity, Hollis veered towards insanity. Instead of being preoccupied by synths, haircuts and cocaine, he told everyone who listened that his favourite singer was Otis Redding, his favourite songwriter Burt Bacharach and his favourite band Can. Hollis immediately got a reputation as a misery guts, but didn't care. He was entirely focused on the music.

It's My Life, recorded in 1984 (complete with video originally mocking lip-synching by a dour Hollis, which when reshot at EMI's request became a total piss-take of lip-synching) established Talk Talk as a massive band in Europe. In 1986, Talk Talk's album The Colour of Spring gave them their first bona-fide UK hit with Life's What You Make It, a circular piano riff influenced by Can's Tago Mago, stapled onto a Steve Winwood-style organ. The hit provided EMI with money and they in turn gave Hollis total financial freedom to pursue whichever artistic avenues he wished.

With that in mind and an unlimited studio budget, Hollis proceeded to record his masterpiece Spirit of Eden. Released in 1988, it was purely improvised and took a year and a half to record. Musicians would come in and jam for hours at a time in a darkened studio lit with incense and candles. Phil Brown, the engineer who would later produce Hollis' solo album, was hired on the strength of one sentence. When asked what was his favourite memory of engineering he responded: "Recording Dear Mr Fantasy, one o'clock in the morning, November 1967." They recreated that memory 20 years on.

Spirit of Eden has not dated; it's remarkable how contemporary it sounds, anticipating post-rock, the Verve and Radiohead. It's the sound of an artist being given the keys to the kingdom and returning with art. Yet upon completion it was seen as utter commercial suicide, as if Duran Duran had released a krautrock, free jazz, gospel album after Notorious. EMI responded by suing Hollis for being wilfully obscure and un-commercial, much as when David Geffen sued Neil Young for not sounding Neil Young enough. This ridiculous case was eventually thrown out of court yet it had a long lasting impact on the music industry. The lawsuit set the precedent for the clause that a band's recordings have to be of a commercially satisfactory nature.

With tensions between EMI and Talk Talk at an all time high, Hollis left and signed with Polydor. EMI responded by re-releasing It's My Life, which not only became an absurdly big hit but won a Brit award, at a time when Talk Talk were moving light years beyond that particular sound. EMI then put out a remix album of the band's material called Natural History Revisited. Hollis retaliated by suing EMI; the album was pulled and the remaining copies were destroyed.

I find the whole story of one man against the system in a bid to maintain creative control incredibly heartening. After the EMI debacle, Talk Talk took up with Polydor who revived the jazz label Verve to put out Laughing Stock, which was even more loose and experimental than Spirit of Eden. Yet the band ceased soon after its release. No particularly reason was given for the split. Stories of hedonistic, opium-laced sessions did the rounds though nothing was ever proven.

Hollis released one solo album in 1998 and then retired from music, only briefly reappearing to play piano on the Unkle track Chaos from the 1998 offering Psyence Fiction and providing musical accompaniment to Anja Garbarek's 2001 album Smiling and Waving. It's a shame that there was no real fanfare for his retirement, but that's probably the way he liked it. With a legacy that includes Spirit of Eden, perhaps there was nothing more he had to prove.